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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 12th, 2023

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  • 3 Abrams is correct, 8 Bradleys sounds about right, but I didn’t hear anything about HIMARS. It is odd that they’re not bragging about the Ukraine confirmed loss of a Patriot system (albeit not the radar but two launchers). I mean, that’s what they’ve been claiming forever. Maybe because they said they destroyed all of them already and can’t now claim destroying any actually?

    Fucking weirdos. Still, compared to Russian losses in manpower and vehicles, this is nothing. For the numbers that Ukraine has, it’s not insignificant for sure. The main thing and difference between Russian losses and Ukraine losses is that the crews often survive the loss of the vehicles on the Ukrainian side, whereas Russia loses both vehicle and crew.





  • Possibly. It’s entirely opaque where I work. I have no clue how they’re compensated whatsoever. We managed to fix it for the most part. I like the customer satisfaction approach via renewals as a target. Especially since you can basically give that to everyone involved on the project. Then again, some customers are dissatisfied as a policy. Worked with some miserable folk who always communicated in a horrible, horrible way but kept renewing and never balked at the cost. It was simply a “you’re a service provider, you’re beneath us” thing. Some people truly suck.



  • We’ve decoupled timelines from estimates almost entirely and to the ire of all our sales and C-Level only give out Quarter based estimates anymore. “End of Q3 or early Q4”. When we deliver mid Q3, everyone is happy. The funny bit is that since we’ve made these changes, we’ve not noticed any drop in client interest at all. What we do notice is that we actually ship what we promise (sometimes even more). We also don’t have clients who think we’ll do 10 hours of work for free anymore, because we’ve anchored the value of every little bit we do properly. We also filter the stingy clients who are completely pointless and are just wasting our time, while engaged with our competitors.

    There’s a lot, a looooot of FOMO in sales on the side of our own sales people. So they lowball their shit to make sure we close. Then we can’t keep what’s promised and nobody is happy and contracts that would only be profitable after like 3 years don’t get renewed and we lose a client. Great stuff. Then try and get them back after a shitty experience like that.

    The mind boggles.



  • Hate this. I work as a PO. Praise my devs every chance I get both internally and towards our clients. Always pass on positive feedback and use negative feedback only translated into priority weights.

    I see my job as keeping stakeholders at bay and let them do their job. I bundle requests into feature requests that cover as many current and future needs as possible, but never without internal meetings first.

    Just getting sales to stop making deals on feature requirements with clients was a very long uphill battle that we have mostly won. Now it all goes through my team first and we always do estimates with our development teams. Takes a bit of time, takes a bit longer, but never have I seen a client get back to us with the same urgency as they request a quote anyway. If they can not wait a week, they won’t be a good fit for what we are doing and how we do things.

    Posts like these make me feel accomplished :D


  • I am om the product side of things and have created some basic proof of concept tools with AI that my bosses wanted to sell off. No way no how will I be able to sevrice or maintain them. It’s incredibly impressive that I could even get this output.

    I am not saying it won’t become possible, but I lack the fundamental knowledge and understanding to make anything beyond the most minor adjustments and AI is still wuite bad at only addressing specific issues or, good forbid, expanding code, without fully rewriting the whole thing and breaking everything else.

    For our devs I see it as a much improved and less snide stackoverflow and Google. The direct conversational nature really speeds things up with boilerplate code and since they actually know what they are doing, it’s amazing. Not only that but we had devs copy paste from online searches withoout fully understanding the snippets. Now the AI can explain it in context.




  • Imperor - mostly long videos playing and teaching Paradox games (currently mainly Crusader Kings 3), but the guy has that kind of voice I like to have just running in the background for comfort, so that works out. Recently started to do some interesting DND/TTRPG stuff as well like little guides for DMs and even quests to put into games. Also looks at smaller games from time to time during steam next fests and such.



  • It does already come with some limitations, though they’re also a matter of interpretation. For example “legitimate interests” cannot be applied to personal data of special categories and may thus not outweigh the rights and interests of the affected persons. This generally requires an assessment to be performed to ensure that is the case.

    It’s not a get out of jail free card (despite a lot of companies seemingly thinking it is).



  • I have no idea and coal sucks and is the result of intense lobbying and corrupt politicians being bought for pennies on the dollar for the last 25 years.

    The point isn’t the water usage of nuclear power, since most of it is evaporated and returned to the cycle, so I’d be surprised if it’s worse than coal in terms of actual consumption. However you need water in large quantities and the correct temperatures to be able to use it for cooling on nuclear.

    If there is no water or not enough water of sufficient temperatures, then you can’t cool the plant. It’s simple as that.

    Droughts overall are horrible for Europe just as much as anywhere else. We’re losing tons of valuable topsoil, forrests are dying contributing to the continual errosion. All this could lead to salination and eventual death of farmland. Crop yields are unpredictable. No country on this planet can exist for any prolonged period of time with droughts, unless it can import everything it can’t produce itself from elsewhere.

    Water usage is generally a huge issue in Germany. Farmers take out far, far more than they’re allotted already and there’s almost no oversight. Large cities like Frankfurt am Main are pulling in water from surrounding areas, leaving them dry. And this isn’t even touching on the basically free use of water for our industries at large. It’s a really bad situation.

    The only point where renewables would “rely” on water beyond their construction processes is either water generated power itself or energy storage (which comes down to the same).


  • All this debate and nobody brings up that, thanks to climate change, cooling nuclear power plants will become a roll of the dice? Same as it already happened in France?

    Droughts are really, really bad for nuclear power. Solar and wind don’t give a shit.

    Doesn’t even matter much which technology is better on any other point. If you cannot run it, it’s worthless. Especially at times with increased power demand for example due to AC usage spiking thanks to the same heat that just poofed your cooling solution into oblivion.


  • They have been an issue for a long time. But COVID really gave a boost to these schools of thought and those that opposed COVID quickly found themselves on networks and pages that were and are spreading right wing and Russian propaganda. It is a huge mess and truly arrived in the middle of society. I have people at work in high positions getting ready to fight some boogyman government overreach that was supposed to happen with COVID, but didn’t happen. Now it is supposed to happen as part of climate change policies… for a while I have kept the official information on what to do if you encounter a Reichsbürger by our BND at hand. It is ridiculous.